Wednesday, 5 March 2008

A few days ago, after surfing through some programing languages topic on wikipedia , I suddenly found myself looking into this new object oriented programing language called Lisaac.

Lisaac is the product of the Isaac Project, currently a small but with very ambitious goals project, that goes from designing, developing and implementing a new operating system up to the design and development of a new prototype-based object oriented language in which this operating system could then be written.

I think that the computer science and software community pretty much agree that we have been kind of stuck with very old-fashioned operating system design for a while now (Do I hear Alan Kay's saying : "no innovation in the last 20 years"?) , and there have been many efforts to address most of these issues through different projects since long time, efforts that goes from very well known and old projects like the GNU/Hurd , and more recent projects like House , each of them trying to come up with the last innovation to move forward to a 'better OS world'. And this concern is really not something new , we could track it back to the 60's or 70's with the Lisp machines or with the firsts Smalltalk systems where we could for example still easily debate if it is an operating system or a programing language (or and IDE, or a collection of classes, or an alive object system, or all of that, or more than that!) , but it seems like somewhere in the road , the communities have made mistakes that avoid these kind of innovations coming upstream.

We can also look at this from another perspective , let's better blame us for being ourselves so addicted to the Unix-like model? , even those who hates this model, end up using it on a daily-forever basis, and deeper inside probably love it too.

So, what happens?

If you have read so far until this line, I might be giving the impression I have the answer for this question , and that I finally found the way of solving the new-OS projects stagnation problems .... well, no, I really don't ..... but, what I can and I am actually doing right now is to point some interest to new projects and efforts , like this one called Isaac/Lisaac.

Briefly speaking, Isaac is intended to be a fully standalone operating system designed with a prototype object oriented model , and for this, the following approach has been taken: Developing a whole new high-level compilable prototype-based object oriented language with low-level capabilities and easy C interfacing. And we get Lisaac.Lisaac is the language with all the previously mentioned characteristics in which this new OS is being written.

This kind of Language-System design approach offers many advantages, one of them is that helps to abstract low level components very easily into a high counterpart , for example, Isaac is composed only of pure prototype objects , things like 'files' and 'processes' disappear, we deal with the operating system components as we would deal with any other object in the user level applications.

Lisaac has been modeled after 3 well-known languages mainly:

Smalltalk: as dynamic as possible.

Self: No class, only prototypes.

Eiffel: the language from which it inherits the most; static typing , design by contract, multiple inheritance and more.

The Lisaac's syntax resembles pretty much a mix of Eiffel and C , with a simple Smalltalk semantic ; since _everything_ is an object, all the communication between these objects go through messages sending. Even the 'if' construct is a message defined in terms of the TRUE and FALSE objects. Other interesting and handy feature is the nice interfacing with C; in Lisaac a backquoted expression like `printf("hello world\n")` is a way of making the compiler to jump into C code directly, this is a reasonable feature considering one of the main purpose of this language (writing an OS) and one of the easiest way of interfacing C code available in a so distinct language from C itself.

As a side note, both the Isaac and Lisaac projects are sponsored by several research labs and organizations and their development are intended to be very open to the software community, for example Lisaac is released under the GPLv3 (Isaac is released under a different special license though).

The latest version of the language is 0.13.1 , and though I have found some bugs here and there on this latest implementation, the development seems very active and the basic features are working very good, you can check for further information about the current status of the implementation and even download it from this page, this latest implementation has also been recently made available for Gentoo users through portage, so you can get it with a simple 'emerge lisaac' too on these systems. Other nice thing about Lisaac is its good compatibility with GCC , so you can get it working without problems (or not too much) into a GCC capable system.

The current implementation is invoked with a simple 'lisaac foo.li' command, where foo.li is a lisaac source code file, and it will generate a C file, foo.c which is automatically linked into an executable.

Though I have not tried it myself, but it seems functioning in its first stage according to the site and reports, you can already download and test an initial version of IsaacOS from here.

Well, too much talking for now, let's show some code. This is the Lisaac version of the (in)famous '99 bottles of beer!' song. :-)